AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Where, Icarus?”
He composed his face, turned, and shrugged, flip as he could seem. “The Canyon Lands, of course.”
Atlas raked a hand through his hair, disrupting the blond coif. “Fucking vampire.”
Icarus wrinkled his nose. “Not right now, baby.” Sparring with him was almost as fun as sparring with Robin. Come to think of it, watching the two of them spar would be epic, assuming they didn’t kill each other first. But first, they had to kill Vincent, which maybe Atlas was keen to help them do, which meant maybe Icarus shouldn’t piss him off. He dropped the teasing act and channeled a little Adam. “And not there, really. Devlin would suspect something. Club Sutro, where we met.”
Atlas stepped closer to one of the other shifters in the room. “Buy the place out for tomorrow night.”
While they coordinated, Icarus continued to take everything in before they wised up and threw him out. He drifted toward the vampire who had multiple books open on her desk and a smaller area map with green dots—same as the green pins on the larger map. “Is this what you have on the covens so far?”
“Shesent us locations this morning,” Atlas answered him. Icarus didn’t miss the emphasis he’d put on the first word; he knew. But how much? Before Icarus could contemplate further, Atlas held a sheet of paper out to him. “She also sent us this.”
It was an email from an alias account he recognized. One that would ping an IP address in Portola, making it seem like she was still there. No subject line. Only one line of text in the message.
tsaEehtnIyL enoloSebotho
“We’re working it as a cypher,” Atlas said. “To get an exact location.”
Icarus laughed. “Stop trying so hard.”
The other vampire twisted in her chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I had this client once. Also a hacker.” Not really. It was his sister who loved these games, always had. For her protection, he shifted the facts a bit as he explained. “Everything was a fucking riddle. Like the fact he dealt in code all day meant he had to make everyone else work for it too. But with words. He’d give me these rhymes about what he wanted—”
“Icarus!” Atlas snapped, his green eyes practically glowing.
“Reverse it, then read it. ‘Oh, to be so lonely in the east.’ Then take out the extra space. Ohlone in the East. The Ohlone shellmound in Encinal,” Icarus said as he gestured at a location near the concentration of green dots on the other side of the Bay. “Everyone knows it’s haunted.”
“Recon,” Atlas ordered the other warlock. “Go, and take a few shifters with you,” he added with a jut of his chin to the dog of some sort that was working the Sutro angle. “Take over for her,” he told the vampire.
“Are we sure—” the other magician started.
“No, which is the point of recon, and we’re burning daylight, so go.” The second of hesitation among the soldiers was enough to blow Atlas’s gaskets. “Move!”
Everyone jumped, including Icarus. While the rest of the room scurried into action, Atlas spun back to him and snatched the email from his hand. “We hit the coven tonight, and you’re coming with us.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Especially the part where Adam and company intercepted Vincent on the Huchiun Enclave, the Ohlone Island halfway between Yerba Buena and Encinal.
Isle in the Middle.
The message in the message she’d sent. The message meant for him.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Icarus’s bonesrattled as the gas-guzzling SUV he rode in with Vincent and Atlas and the grumpy warlock whose name he’d learned was Brock rumbled onto the decrepit auto bridge that spanned the Bay between YB and Encinal. Most folks who traveled from one side of the Bay to the other took the light rail. Several miles north, it crossed the Bay at an angle, covering more distance and connecting more stable areas of land. Their caravan, by contrast, was going from one iffy piece of land to another iffy piece of land over the iffiest of iffiest auto bridges left. No other cars dared travel on it, but what choice did they have? Vincent had insisted they roll out with a fleet of gas-powered SUVs, one in front of theirs, two behind them, so there they were, traversing a crumbling metal and cement mass that was one good shake from annihilation.
Icarus was tempted to extend his arm out the window, dig his claws into one of the pylons, and scream through the pain for her to take it all down. Impossible, unfortunately, with his wrists in Atlas’s favorite pair of silver cuffs, looped through the passenger door handle to further restrict his movement. At least the asshole had divested him of the too-tight suit coat and wrapped it around his wrists, preventing the cuffs from burning through Icarus’s pants where his hands rested in his lap. Trapped, Icarus waited and watched, keeping his ears on Vincent and Atlas behind him, one eye on Brock the Rock beside him, and the rest of his attention on the road ahead.
On the island in the middle of the bridge’s span from which Adam and his team would launch their surprise attack.
“You seem tense,” Vincent said.
Icarus twisted as much as the cuffs would allow. “I’m in a tank, in a line of tanks, on a bridge that could fall into the Bay at any second. Of course I’m fucking tense.”
“But I heard you could fly.”
